If you are starting web design, chances are you are learning about it through books, tutorials and other “on your own” sources.  The web has millions of articles written on how to design a website.  The best way, however is to read my blog post first

I assume you know a little bit about css and html and know how to launch a simple static website with four or five pages.  A four page website generally consists of a homepage, contact page, about page, and maybe a services page.  Generally with a full static sites you would create a homepage, and one sub-page for all other pages. If your site starts to grow in pages and links, managing your static site may become time consuming and complicated.  You could move your site to a full content management platform, or you can dynamic elements to your static site by applying a little bit of PHP code to spruce up your site and learn a little bit of PHP in the process.

Face it folks, grasping PHP is not easy if you have no idea how programming works.  I, for example, always got confused with the “echo ‘hello world’ ” examples because I did not find them practical in web design.  Another words, when I started on my design project I had no idea how to use and apply “echo hello world” statements or similar, in a practical web design job.  So in this tutorial I will give you simple practical code to get you jump started with your PHP learning process.  The code examples, I will show you, are useful in everyday web design, and not only useful but even necessary.

Lets get our fingers wet.

Recently there was an article at Mashable.com titled:

IE6 Must Die for the Web to Move On

It created jitters around social networks such as Twitter and Digg.  IE6 is an outdated browser which cannot render and run new web applications correctly. Developers and web designers literally pull their hair trying to make the site work in IE6 by applying patches just to make the basic functions work.  Internet Explorere 6 is the most hated application next to Vista.  In general internet community has long despised the works of Microsoft for it’s inability to amaze the world, like Apple has, and its ability to destroy competition, as it has done to Netscape.

We all want to be the first to come up with great tasty and delicious design ideas, but seldom does it happen. When I’m speaking about “GREAT IDEAS” I’m not talking about special cases where one saw a dream perhaps, or was sitting in the beach house one evening and suddenly as if by lightning something hit and knocked ‘em over, and he produced a masterpiece. I’m thinking more ordinary practical way you can use to come up and produce good or great design ideas. Usually you can tell when your design idea is a great one. It doesn’t necessarily mean that if it is great to you, it must be great to others. As designers we know when we don’t like our results. We may scratch our head and think our design idea is too dry, boring, missing something, overwhelming, or plain dumb. Nevertheless we sometimes settle with our poor imagination because after spending hours, we produced little inspiration.

You might ask yourself, “How can I come up with great looking designs almost every time?” I don’t necessarily know what works for you, but I will share with you some methods that help me.

I call them

TWO CARDINAL METHODS

1. Don’t settle with your first, second, third ideas. Why? because the first few design ideas that are spinning in your head come not from your creativity but rather from your relativity or association with other ideas. That is why it is necessary to dispose them from your head. Don’t expect to be creative on a first or second set of logos you created, because all they are, are reflections of works you’ve probably saw from somewhere else. Once you exhaust all your relative ideas, your brain becomes free from clutter, and you start designing ORIGINAL (OEM) stuff that is coming from your own well.

2. Try designing from 12am to 3am. I’m absolutely serious about that. This is the time frame when your logic becomes slouchy and your creative side continues to process. This is an important stage because all your attention is then focused on creativity. When your creative mind takes over the steering wheel, (which by the way is always steered by logic) then instead of always progressing in a straight pattern(as logic usually does) it begins to wonder in every direction it possibly can. What you will notice is the wealth of ideas that start pouring out. The only problem is keeping up with all of them. If you easily fall asleep, drink some tea instead of coffee, because tea keeps you calm but alert much longer than coffee.

If you use other effective methods please share them buy commenting on this post.

My new portfolio is 98% percent complete.  Have you noticed how tough the last few things to polish off can be? They are like a nag because you don’t know which way to turn to get them completed.  Eventually I will get those taken care of as those will continue to bother me while I’m populating this empty site.  I must mention that this is the first time I’ve worked with wordpress theme;  it took me over a month to get this theme running. I worked with a few concepts until finally I was satisfied with the current look.

I would like to get your opinion on the final design.  I dont care if you don’t like it as long as I can get some professional criticism.